The Suppression of Fusion - Who Stole Fire from Mankind? - 21st Century
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Who Stole Fire from Mankind?
The Suppression of Fusion
by Megan Beets
T
he achievement of controlled fusion has been at scientists, engineers, and scientific institutions. Fusion is
mankind’s fingertips for decades. Had the trajectory not “always fifty years away”; it has been deliberately
established in the early decades of the U.S. fusion suppressed under a top-down imperial policy, carried out
program continued, mastery of fusion as a power source via the mechanism of intentionally crippling budget cuts,
would already be providing nations of the world with vir- which have created a factor of attrition strong enough to
tually unlimited energy, would have created a qualitative delay for decades what would have surely already been
transformation in our powers of industry, transportation, achieved. One merely has to envision where we would
and medicine, and would have completely revolution- have been as a species today had fusion been achieved
ized our species’ power to transform the conditions of by the 1990s, as intended by leading fusion scientists in
life on our planet through unprecedented rates of physi- 1976.1
cal economic growth and development.
The failure to realize this promise is not due to its im- 1. Dean, S.O.: Fusion Power by Magnetic Confinement: Program
possibility, nor to a lack of capability on the part of fusion Plan. U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration Report
ERDA-76/110 (July 1976).
Offprint • May 2014 21st CENTURY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 1
The undermining of fusion, typified by the dismally (now NASA’s Langley Research Center) in 1939 by two
low FY15 budget request of the Obama administration, young scientists, Arthur Kantrowitz and Eastman Jacobs.
which proposes to shut down key fusion experiments in This very early attempt failed to produce fusion, but was
the U.S., must immediately cease. A fully funded, accel- followed up throughout the 1940s by work at both the
erated fusion program as a priority national mission is at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (now Los Alamos Na-
the foundation of the survival and progress of our nation, tional Laboratory) and Princeton University (today the
and mankind as a whole. Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory). By 1946, it was
concluded at Los Alamos that in order to achieve net en-
Fusion: A New Era for Mankind ergy from fusion, a steady state plasma would have to
It was only at the end of the 19th century that man- be heated to a temperature of around 100 million de-
kind entered the atomic age and began to understand grees3—ten times hotter than the center of the Sun, and
and harness the power of the atomic nucleus, a char- far beyond anything ever achieved on Earth.
acteristic of matter inaccessible to the understanding In 1951, Lyman Spitzer at Princeton was given a
gained from simply chemical processes. Radioactivity $50,000 grant by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)
was first discovered in the 1890s, and it was in 1905 that to construct his design for a “stellarator,” a modified
Einstein proposed that a small amount of mass could be magnetic bottle, designed to counteract the “drift” of the
converted to a large amount of energy (in proportion to plasma which arose in simple toroidal configurations and
the speed of light squared, E=mc2). Here was the concep- prevented fusion conditions from being reached within
tual birth of fusion power. Whereas nuclear fission har- the plasma. The original stellarator program at Princeton
nesses the energy released when a heavy atom (such as included four proposed phases, Models A through D,
uranium, plutonium, or thorium) is broken apart, fusion with Model-D being a planned demonstration reactor.
reactions bring together the lightest elements (such as James Tuck at Los Alamos led the building of a
isotopes of hydrogen or helium), and is millions of times project in the winter of 1952/53 which he named the
more energy dense than coal, oil, or natural gas, and an “Perhapsatron”.4 The Perhapsatron was a toroidal mag-
order of magnitude more energy dense than fission fuels. netic bottle which would try to achieve fusion using a
The fuels of fusion are also incredibly abundant, being “pinch” concept.5 The pinch and the stellarator designs,
found in seawater (in the case of deuterium, an isotope along with the “mirror machine”, led by Richard Post at
of hydrogen) or scattered throughout the lunar soil (in the the University of California Radiation Lab at Livermore
case of helium-3), and could power the human species (later Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), formed
on Earth for billions of years. the backbone of what became the U.S. classified pro-
It was determined in 1955 by John D. Lawson in the gram to achieve controlled thermonuclear fusion: “Proj-
U.K. that three basic theoretical parameters would have ect Sherwood”.
to be met for a successful, sustained fusion reaction to Funded by the AEC under the auspices of President
produce energy over time. This is known as the Lawson Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” policy, and led
criterion, and determines a minimum product of the tem- by the same scientists who had harnessed the power of the
perature (energy) of the fusing ions, their density, and the atom in the form of weapons during the war, Sherwood
minimum confinement time necessary to create condi- sought to utilize the groundwork in nuclear research laid
tions for a sustained, energy-producing fusion reaction during wartime for purposes of peace and development.
to occur. Given that the fuel would have to be heated to As it was put by AEC Chairman Lewis L. Strauss in 1954,
temperatures hotter than the Sun, no ordinary material “Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy
could contain it. However, since the fuel is made up of too cheap to meter... It is not too much to expect that our
charged particles, a different type of “wall,” a magnetic children will know of great periodic regional famines in
field, can be used to contain the reactants. Hence the the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly
birth of the “magnetic bottle.”2 over the seas and under them and through the air with a
The U.S. Fusion Program: Beginnings 3. All temperatures are given in Kelvin.
The early U.S. fusion program was born in the cradle 4. Perhaps it would work. Perhaps it would not. The Perhapsatron did
of the U.S. national scientific laboratories, first with an not work, but ended up laying the basis for the next stages of fusion
designs.
attempt at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory
5. A “pinch” uses the natural tendency of an electric field, induced
within a flow of plasma, to compress the material of the plasma toward
2. Another approach to confining the fusion fuel is called inertial con- the center of the plasma column, which then collapses under the force
finement, where a fuel target (e.g., a pellet of deuterium-tritium fuel) is into a very dense, thin filament structure. The idea was to utilize this
heated and compressed by the effects high energy beams delivered phenomenon to reach the temperatures and densities required for fu-
to the outside of the target. sion reactions, before instabilities disrupt the plasma.
2 21st CENTURY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Offprint • May 2014
LLNL LANL
The Table Top mirror machine at Livermore (left) and the Scylla machine at Los Alamos (right) during the 1950s Project
Sherwood days.
minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will expe- long enough to see the same natural force which pow-
rience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields ers the hydrogen bomb tamed for peaceful purposes. A
and man comes to understand what causes him to age.”6 breakthrough could come tomorrow as well as a decade
Such was the natural optimism surrounding the scientific hence. Out of our laboratories may come a discovery as
prospects of fusion. important as the Promethean taming of fire.”
The existence of Project Sherwood was announced to
the public leading into the IAEA’s first International Con- The 1960s
ference on Atomic Energy, held in Geneva in 1955, and Spearheaded by the U.S., U.S.S.R., and U.K., work pro-
limited international cooperation began in 1956.7 It was ceeded into the 1960s, and substantial fusion research
fully declassified as part of the second International Con- also began in such nations as Germany, France, and Ja-
ference on Atomic Energy in 1958. The same year, an pan. Work on the Scylla design at Los Alamos continued,
experiment at Los Alamos became the first experiment in and by 1964, temperatures in excess of 40 million de-
any laboratory to produce neutrons from thermonuclear grees were achieved by the Scylla IV, though confine-
fusion: the Scylla I.8 Lewis Strauss, who as Chairman of ment time was still quite short: less than 10 millionths of a
the AEC increased the fusion budget from $7.3 million9 second. In 1968, an announcement came from the Soviet
in 1951 to $114.7 million by 1958, wrote of Project Union that record temperatures and confinement times
Sherwood: “The importance of ‘Sherwood’ as the proj- had been achieved with the Soviet tokamak design in
ect was called, now conceded to be at least theoretically its T-3 machine.10 When these breakthrough results were
feasible, can hardly be overstated, and I hope to live confirmed by a delegation from the U.K.’s Culham Labo-
ratory in 1969, the world began converting their toroidal
magnetic bottles to tokamaks, including the conversion
6. Lewis Strauss, AEC Chairman (1953-1958) in a September 16,
1954 speech to the National Association of Science Writers. of the Model-C stellarator at Princeton, which became
the first U.S. machine to confirm the Soviet results.
7. Reflecting the optimism of the period, head of the Indian Atomic
Energy Commission Homi J. Bhabha, who presided over the 1955 Inertial fusion, in which fusion is triggered by a rapid
conference in Geneva, said in his presidential address, “I venture to application of energy to a pellet of fuel, also had its be-
predict that a method will be found for liberating fusion energy in a con- ginnings in the 1960s. With the invention of the laser in
trolled manner within the next two decades. When that happens the
energy problems of the world will have been solved forever, for the fuel
1960, discussions began about the possibility of using a
will be as plentiful as the heavy hydrogen in the oceans.” laser to set off a “micro hydrogen bomb” which could be
contained in a chamber and harnessed for energy, and
8. The Scylla designs were based on a “theta-pinch” concept, similar
to the “z-pinch” of Tuck’s Perhapsatron, but with a different orientation the first patent applications for a laser fusion design were
of the magnetic and electric fields. filed in 1969.
9. All budget figures are given in 2013 dollars. Budget sources: Fu-
sion Power Associates; the U.S. Energy Iniformation Agency; and 10. The tokamak design, begun in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, is a
Bishop, Amasa S., “Project Sherwood: The U.S. Program in Con- toroidal magnetic bottle with helically-wrapped coils, with a strong to-
trolled Fusion,” 1958. roidal (along the axis of the tube) magnetic field.
Offprint • May 2014 21st CENTURY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 3
Fusion Designs
Stellarator
European Nuclear Society PPPL
Left: The stellarator uses an externally-applied helical magnetic field to provide a twist in the path of the plasma
particles, thereby counteracting net forces on the particles and keeping them on a “straight” path as they travel
around the vessel. The earliest stellarators accomplished the same thing with a figure-8 geometry.
Right: An early stellarator at Princeton.
Pinch
Left: The z-pinch design uses a magetic field (A) to induce
an electric field (B) in the plasma along the direction of
the plasma flow. The charged plasma flow is pinched
inward under the Lorentz force, into a thin, dense
filament. Right: The Perhapsatron at Los Alamos.
LANL
This diagram of the Tandem
Mirror design shows the ba-
sic principle of the mirror
machine. Hot plasma in the
center of the cylindrical re-
actor vessel (A) is contained
within the chamber by two
mirror magnets, which “plug”
Mirror
the ends (B) and turn (or re-
flect) most of the plasma ions
back into the center where
they undergo fusion (C). The
mirror design was considered
potentially more favorable for
a commercialized reactor, be-
cause its linear design was eas-
ier to engineer and led to less
instabilities in the plasma.
LLNL
4 21st CENTURY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Offprint • May 2014
LLNL
Left: Basic tokamak design. The tokamak features two external magnetic fields (toroidal and poloidal) designed to
contain the plasma long enough for fusion reactions to occur. Right: The first tokamak, T-1, in the Soviet Union.
By the end of the 1960s, the fusion budget had risen blet-II at General Atomics, and the PLT at Princeton. In
from $114.7 million in 1958 to $140 million in 1968, al- 1974, the Atomic Energy Commission was abolished,
lowing the groundwork to be laid for the breakthroughs and fusion research was rehoused under the newly-cre-
to come in the 1970s. ated Energy Research and Development Administration,
the precursor to the Department of Energy (DOE). The
The 1970s same year, even before operation of the PLT began, the
By the early 1970s, the decision was made to elevate Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) was approved for
the fusion program to division status within the Atomic construction at Princeton as the follow-on “physics test
Energy Commission. By 1972, with a budget increase to reactor” to the PLT, with the expectation of achieving
$144.7 million, a plan was mapped out for future fusion breakeven.
facilities and experiments designed to prove the scientific At Livermore, the mirror machine was well advanced
feasibility of fusion.11 A 1972 planning project within the from its humble beginnings during the Sherwood days,
AEC projected important results from the planned Princ- and in 1975, the 2XIIB at the Lawrence Livermore Labo-
eton Large Torus (PLT) by 1978, and the follow-on op- ratory achieved plasma parameters comparable to those
eration of a physics test reactor, to produce 10 MW of being achieved in the more widely worked-on tokamaks.
fusion power, by 1984.12 In 1971 a small tokamak began In 1977 a new design, the Tandem Mirror Experiment
operation at Oak Ridge National Lab, ORMAK, which (TMX), intended to solve the “end plug” problem,13 was
would come to play an important role in the ability to approved. The TMX began operation in October 1978,
raise the temperature of the plasma to thermonuclear and its success led to the approval of the more advanced
levels. In 1973, approval was given for initial efforts at Mirror Fusion Test Facility (MFTF), to be completed in
fusion power plant design by teams at the University of 1985.
Wisconsin, General Atomics, Argonne National Lab, and As the 1970s progressed, and the great pace of ad-
Oak Ridge National Lab. vancements in all three mainline approaches (tokamak,
With a growing budget, three new tokamaks were ap- pinch, and mirror machine) accelerated, steps were tak-
proved for construction: the Alcator-A at MIT, the Dou- en to accelerate fusion research through expanded inter-
national cooperation. In 1973, President Richard Nixon
and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed an agreement
11. At the time this was understood to mean the achievement of the on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. The first U.S.
Lawson criteria in a deuterium plasma experiment, or to mean “equiv-
alent scientific breakeven”—that is, an experiment using only deute-
rium fuel that would have produced more energy than it took to heat
the plasma, if tritium had been included as a fuel. This has not yet 13. The mirror design is an open-ended, straight magnetic bottle with
been accomplished. two strong “mirroring” magnetic coils at the ends of the tube, which
turn the plasma flow back toward the center of the machine. The linear
12. Both of these goals were achieved. The PLT achieved such re- design was suggested to be better for commercialization than the to-
sults in 1978 (see below), and a physics test reactor, the Tokamak Fu- kamak, as all sides of the machine are accessible for maintenance
sion Test Reactor (TFTR), began operation at Princeton in 1982. and repair, and because its plasmas tended to be more stable than in
TFTR did indeed produce 10 MW of fusion power, though not until the closed, toroidal designs. However, too many ions were leaking out
1994, ten years after originally projected. the ends. Hence the “end plug” problem.
Offprint • May 2014 21st CENTURY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 5
EIRNS
Left: James R. Schlesinger, whose Malthusian views woudn't allow the realization of practicable fusion power, leading
to his efforts to delay and undermine fusion during his tenure as Energy Secretary, from 1977-1979.
Right: Congressman Mike McCormack, sponsor of the 1980 Magnetic Fusion Energy Engineering Act, speaks to a
meeting of the Fusion Energy Foundation in May, 1981.
team to travel to the U.S.S.R. under the agreement was a ignition, 44 million degrees.15 Achieving this temperature
fusion team, which, among other parts of the Soviet fu- milestone was especially significant, since the Alcator to-
sion program, was casually briefed on a technique being kamak at MIT had recently shown that it was possible to
developed for inertial fusion which corresponded quite confine a plasma at the needed density for a long enough
closely to very highly classified work being done in the time to achieve ignition.16 Breaking the temperature
U.S. at the Sandia Laboratory. threshold for ignition broke a psychological threshold,
While the perspective for a robust fusion program too. As put by Dr. Stephen Dean, head of the Confine-
seemed to characterize the early part of the decade, the ment Systems Divison in the Office of Fusion Energy at
end of the 1970s would prove to be a decisive collision DOE, “The question of whether fusion is feasible from
point on issues of global policy. a scientific point of view has now been answered... It is
the first time we’ve produced the actual conditions of a
The PLT and the Magnetic Fusion fusion reactor in a scale-model device.”
While news of the breakthrough was excitedly dissem-
Energy Engineering Act inated around the fusion community, it was determined
The Princeton Large Torus, which produced its first that the official announcement could not be made pub-
plasma in 1975, would soon take center stage in a policy lic until the upcoming August 23 IAEA fusion meeting
fight that stretched far beyond the bounds of so-called in Innsbruck, Austria. News, however, did get out to the
“scientific research.” press, after which the DOE leadership under Secretary
In late July, 1978, reports came that scientists at Princ- of Energy James Schlesinger did everything possible to
eton had succeeded in using auxiliary heating in the PLT, downplay the importance of the results, including an at-
demonstrated first with Oak Ridge’s ORMAK14 tokamak, tempt to stop a DOE press conference scheduled for Au-
to raise the temperature of the plasma to a level never gust 14 (which did, after all, go forward, though with the
before achieved—over 60 million degrees—for the first
time surpassing the minimum temperature required for
15. Of a deuterium-tritium (or D-T) plasma. Mel Gottlieb, head of the
Princeton Lab, told an August 14, 1978 press conference, “It took us
seven years to go from several million degrees to 26 million in Decem-
ber 1977, and then just six months to go another 35 million.”
14. ORMAK had succeeded in producing a temperature of 20 million
degrees with neutral beam heating, a type of auxiliary heating—triple 16. These were the three parameters outlined by Lawson in order to
what had been achieved less than a decade earlier in the T-3 toka- have a net power-producing fusion reactor: plasma density, confine-
mak. ment time, and temperature.
6 21st CENTURY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Offprint • May 2014
conspicuous exclusion of the head of the DOE Fusion in a position to produce enough energy for all time, for
Office, Ed Kintner). Schlesinger’s DOE insisted that the all mankind. This is not hyperbole, but fact.” In a subse-
results obtained at Princeton were not, in fact, a break- quent interview, in contrast to the outlook of Schlesinger,
through, and that fusion was just as far away as ever. McCormack said that fusion “could be the most impor-
John Deutch, DOE Director of Energy Research, echoed tant deterrent to war in all of history.”
his boss by saying that these results were good for Princ- The bill which became the Magnetic Fusion Energy
eton, but were not a breakthrough. Engineering Act of 1980 authorized the construction of
This suppression is not surprising from one such as an Engineering Test Facility by 1987, and for the first ex-
Schlesinger, who wrote in his 1960 The Political Econ- perimental power reactor to put net power on the grid
omy of National Security: “Economics is the science of by 2000. Funding authorization also included the expan-
choice in a world of limited resources... We have gone sion and upgrading of the nation’s science education
around the world spreading the ‘gospel of plenty’ raising programs. It had an estimated cost of $48 billion over
the level of expectations… [but] in the nature of things, two decades. Quickly gaining 140 co-sponsors, the bill
these rising expectations can never be satisfied… We passed the House overwhelmingly on August 27 by a
must in our strategic policy return to the days before the vote of 365 to 7. The Senate passed a companion bill by
Industrial Revolution… [and] prepare to fight limited voice vote soon after, and the Magnetic Fusion Energy
wars.” Engineering Act of 1980 was signed into law by President
Not everyone in positions of policy-making agreed Carter on October 7th.
with the Malthusian Schlesinger, however. Congressman However, losing his bid for re-election the following
Mike McCormack of Washington state seized the mo- month,18 McCormack would not be in the Congress to
mentum created by the PLT results to convene a scien- oversee the implementation of the 1980 law. A report
tific advisory panel in the Congress which met over the issued in December by McCormack’s Subcommittee on
course of 1979, and concluded that the biggest barrier to Energy Research and Production warned the incoming
fusion was a lack of political commitment, and an inad- administration and the nation, quite prophetically, that
equate level of funding. Meanwhile, the public interest in “...the hardest battles are yet to come. There must be
fusion boomed, with subscriptions to Fusion magazine, continual annual authorizations and subsequent appro-
published by the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF)17 soar- priations of funds... It will take tremendous vigilance and
ing to 100,000—making it the second most widely circu- determination on the part of the nation to carry through
lated science magazine in the nation. the 20-year development plan which is necessary to
The FEF played a critical role throughout the 1970s make fusion a reality.”
and into the 1980s, in educating the public and policy-
makers alike on fusion, with dozens of seminars held A Commitment Reversed
around the world, in addition to Fusion magazine, face- Mere months after the Magnetic Fusion Energy Engi-
to-face organizing, and in publicly taking on the political neering Act was signed, the incoming Reagan admin-
fights against the attempts to sabotage fusion. In October istration submitted its first budget for FY1982, with a
of 1978, in response to the optimistic breakthrough at request for fusion funding which would make the imple-
Princeton, the FEF released a memorandum to Congress mentation of the fusion law impossible. The 1980 law
outlining an acceleration in the fusion program, and a mandated that “The Secretary of Energy shall develop a
proposed budget comparable to that of the 1960s Apollo plan for the creation of a national magnetic fusion en-
Program. gineering center for the purpose of accelerating fusion
In January 1980, Congressman McCormack an- technology development via the concentration and co-
nounced at a conference on nuclear safety in Wash- ordination of major magnetic fusion engineering devices
ington, D.C. that he would be introducing legislation to and associated activities at such a center.” However, in
“make it the policy of the U.S. government to bring the July of 1982, by which time the Secretary of Energy was
first electric-generating fusion power plant on line before to have submitted a plan for carrying out the establish-
the year 2000.” He said, “We must move into the engi- ment of the engineering center, the DOE replied via act-
neering phase with fusion. We must not wait for some- ing Director of Energy Research, Doug Pewitt, “We have
body else to do it... Once we develop fusion, we will be determined that it is premature to establish fully the na-
tional magnetic fusion engineering center at this time,”
17. The FEF, founded in 1974 by Lyndon LaRouche, had been crucial
in making sure that news of the PLT breakthrough got out to the public,
and to the White House, helping to ensure that the planned press con- 18. Due to the early concession of Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan
ference was able to go ahead. See: “Schlesinger vs. Fusion: A Dos- before polls had closed on the West Coast, many Democrats didn’t
sier.” EIR, August 29, 1978, and “The Coming Breakthroughs in Fu- bother to vote, meaning that many Democratic candidates for both
sion,” Fusion, October, 1978. state and federal positions lost their elections.
Offprint • May 2014 21st CENTURY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 7
and instead proposed that an “En-
gineering Feasibility Preparations
Project” be established at an exist-
ing fusion research site.
In protest over this betrayal, Ed
Kintner resigned his post as Direc-
tor of the Office of Fusion Energy
at DOE in November 1981. Writing
the following year about the bud-
getary attacks on fusion, Kintner
said that the fusion budget offered
by the administration for FY1983
was not only lower than what was
needed to carry out the 1980 act,
but was 25% less than the budget
for 1977! He said that this “leave[s]
the fusion program without a stra-
tegic backbone—it is a collection
of individual projects and activities
without a defined mission or time-
table... The plan to increase indus-
try involvement in fusion develop- LLNL
ment is postponed indefinitely, and
The MFTF under construction in 1981. The reactor was fully completed, but then
the industrial and economic ben-
mothballed before it could ever run an experiment! The reactor vessel and
efits of high-technology spin-offs,
structures weigh 8 million pounds, including 3 million pounds of superconducting
surely an increasingly important
magnets, designed to confine a plasma at more than 100 million degrees.
by-product of an accelerated fusion
technology program, will be lost.”19 Lawrence Livermore Lab, where the “mirror” approach
One month after Kintner’s resignation, George Key- had been progressing with encouraging results: funding
worth, science adviser to President Reagan, announced for the operation of the Mirror Fusion Test Facility (MFTF)
to a hearing in Congress: “The U.S. cannot expect to be was cut from the budget, and the MFTF was mothballed
pre-eminent in all scientific fields, nor is it desirable.” on the same day that it was officially completed, without
The official position of the U.S. government became, ever being allowed to run a single experiment. The mir-
from Keyworth’s mouth: “It is not the government’s re- ror program had been successfully killed, squeezed out
sponsibility to conduct energy R&D and pursue energy of a rapidly constricting budget.
independence. It is the responsibility of private industry.” By the end of the 1980s, there was absolutely no sci-
Keyworth added, sophistically, that abundant funding “... entific reason not to capitalize on the success of projects
can even promote mediocrity, rather than stimulate ex- such as the TFTR, and the great knowledge of the teams
cellence.” How far the U.S. government had come from assembled at Princeton and elsewhere, to move to the
the vision of Kennedy’s Apollo Program!20 next stage in the tokamak program: the creation of sus-
In December 1982, almost as if in defiance of the tained fusion power. The cause of the failure to do so,
growing attacks on the fusion program, the workhorse even to this day, has been purely political. In 1988, the
Thermonuclear Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) at Princeton team at Princeton submitted a completed design for the
produced its first plasma, and would go on in 1986 to set follow-on to TFTR, the Compact Ignition Tokamak (CIT),
the record plasma temperature of 200 million degrees. which would demonstrate a sustained “burning” plasma
Also in 1986, however, a great casualty was suffered at by the year 2000.21 However, in October 1989 it was an-
nounced by President George Bush, Sr.’s DOE represen-
19. Kintner, E.E. "Casting Fusion Adrift." MIT Technology Review.
May/June 1982.
21. A burning, or ignited plasma means that the fusion reactions oc-
20. “Those who came before us made certain that this country rode curring in the fuel are able to maintain the necessary temperature for
the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern a sustained reaction without the additional input of auxiliary heating
invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation (just as a fire requires initial input, but will burn as long as there is fuel
does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of available). The term “burning” does not indicate a literal flame in the
space. We mean to be a part of it—we mean to lead it.” John F. Ken- plasma, but that the “fire” of fusion is a descendent of the original gifts
nedy, September 12, 1963, Rice University, Texas. of Prometheus to man.
8 21st CENTURY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Offprint • May 2014
The 1990s and ITER
With the U.S. fusion program be-
ing slowly choked off by year-after-
year budget cuts, to the effect of an
increasing loss of smaller and “al-
ternative” (i.e., not either tokamak
or inertial fusion design) fusion ex-
periments at the national labs and
universities, attention shifted to an
“outside” hope: the U.S. involve-
ment in international collaboration
on the large tokamak, ITER.22 Initi-
ated in November 1985 from the
“Reagan-Gorbachev Agreements,”
ITER was to be a very large toka-
mak, designed and built jointly by
the U.S., the U.S.S.R., European
nations, Japan, and Canada,23 with
the hopes of producing 500MW of
fusion power, sustained over 480
PPPL seconds, and would be the precur-
The Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at Princeton. TFTR operated from 1982 to 1997, sor to a DEMO tokamak reactor,
setting many significant records both in plasma temperature and in peak fusion designed to put power on the grid.
power produced, before it was prematurely shut down. Meanwhile, the TFTR at Princ-
eton, despite the increasingly hos-
tative, Robert Hunter, that such an advancement simply tile and crippling budget cuts and delays, set a series of
wasn’t in the budget, and that an additional $50 million record plasma temperatures and would go on in 1994 to
dollar cut to the fusion budget would be coming down achieve the major milestone which had been mapped
the pipe. Hunter told a Congressional hearing that the out in 1972: the production of a peak fusion power of
CIT was too risky, and probably would not succeed. Dr. 10.7 MW—90 million times what was possible in the
Stephen Dean (former head of the magnetic confinement early ‘70s, when the experiment was first proposed.24 Just
systems at the AEC and DOE) responded that, “We’ve one year later, TFTR set another record plasma tempera-
got to take some risks if we intend to develop a machine ture of 510 million degrees.
that makes electricity. If Columbus had waited for radar Just two years after TFTR had set this high record,
to be discovered before he set out, we wouldn’t be here however, it was decommissioned in an astoundingly ir-
today.” responsible act of budget cutting, in the midst of Newt
That $50 million cut, $12 million of which came from Gingrich’s “Conservative Revolution”, and was finally
the Princeton facility, virtually ensured the cancellation dismantled in 2002. Its sister tokamaks, the Joint Euro-
of the CIT project, and the facility was forced to lay off pean Torus (JET) and the JT-60 in Japan are operational
120 personnel, scattering the knowledge base assembled (with significant upgrades) to this day, and have gone
there, and delivering a severe blow to morale well be- on to surpass the records set by the prematurely-retired
yond the bounds of Princeton. As outlined below, these TFTR.
cuts were not merely the folly of a gaggle of fiscally- In 1999, two years after TFTR was decommissioned,
minded bureaucrats; they were the key mechanism for the U.S. shocked the world when the Congress refused to
carrying out an intentional policy to kill fusion.
As the 1990s approached, the fate of fusion research in
the United States was very much in jeopardy. The earliest 22. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, now un-
der construction in Cadarache, France.
of the 1976-predicted dates that a demonstration reactor
could have been put on the grid had come, and the in- 23. This group today includes: the U.S., E.U., Russia, Japan, India,
China and South Korea. For more on the history of U.S. involvement
tentional sabotage of both the planned experiments and in ITER, see: “Fusion Energy Moves One Step Closer,” EIR, Decem-
the creative optimism of the community of fusion scien- ber 12, 2003.
tists, growing both in numbers and in competence, was 24. This was superseded three years later by the Joint European To-
having its effect. rus (JET), which produced 16MW, still the current world record.
Offprint • May 2014 21st CENTURY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 9Whence the reversal of
the success and optimism
which drove the great prog-
ress made in fusion research
in the 1970s? Why was the
1980 Magnetic Fusion En-
ergy Engineering Act never
allowed to be implemented?
As outlined below, fusion
was not the happenstance
victim of the fiscally con-
servative environment cre-
ated following the “days of
plenty” of the 1970s. The
fact that billions of people
are not now already benefit-
ing from the beginnings of a
fusion economy was entirely
intentional.
Library of Congress Evil Policies and
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, seen here with President Gerald Ford, presided over Evil People
the implementation of NSSM 200, and worked to ensure that the British Empire policy
of population reduction supplanted the pro-growth and pro-progress policies of John F. The U.S. economy will re-
Kennedy. quire large and increasing
amounts of minerals from
allocate a mere $12 million for continued participation in abroad, especially from less developed countries. That
ITER, forcing the U.S. to withdraw from the program. The fact gives the U.S. enhanced interest in the political,
reason given by Chairman of the House Science com- economic, and social stability of the supplying coun-
mittee James Sensenbrenner was that, “It defies common tries. Wherever a lessening of population pressures
sense that the United States should agree to continue to through reduced birth rates can increase the prospects
participate in a dead-end project that continues to waste for such stability, population policy becomes relevant
the American taxpayer’s dollars.” Had this cut to ITER to resource supplies and to the economic interests of
been paired with a restoration of funding to re-open the the United States...
shuttered domestic program, perhaps Sensenbrenner’s Although population pressure is obviously not the
ignorant comment would have been made more palat- only factor involved, these types of frustrations are
able. However, this was not the case. much less likely under conditions of slow or zero popu-
Funding for domestic research has continued to fall lation growth. —NSSM 200, 1974
year after year, since its peak funding year in 1982,25 cul-
minating in the astoundingly low budget allocations of This frankly evil statement by the deranged Henry Kiss-
the Obama administration, which are threatening shut- inger, contained in National Security Study Memoran-
down of the MIT Alcator C-Mod, among other incredibly dum 200 (NSSM 200), written in 1974 under his direc-
valuable programs.26 tion at the U.S. State Department, was not just an idle
threat to peoples of the third world; it was signed into
25. The exception to this has been a rise in the domestic program for law as official U.S. policy by President Ford in December
inertial fusion (funded under defense programs), with the building of 1975. Three years earlier, the Club of Rome,27 founded
the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
However, peak fuding of inertial fusion came in 2006, with much of the
recent work at NIF laying more of an emphasis on weapons testing, out of that.” Speech in Fairfax, Virginia. September 13, 2010. A con-
rather than fusion. tinuation of the shift to “green” technologies will lead to mass death.
26. And what is being offered in place of fusion? Take the statement 27. The Club of Rome, a self-styled “old-boys' club” set up by fascist
of President Obama on how to solve the world’s energy needs: “We elites Alexander King and Aurelio Peccei, has served as a central co-
wouldn’t need new technologies. We wouldn’t need to invent some ordinating body and control mechanism over governments, via its in-
fancy new fusion energy or anything. If we just took our existing build- tegration with institutions such as the U.N. and OECD, to impose poli-
ing stock in homes and insulated them, had new windows—schools, cies of population control. In a 1981 interview with EIR, King lamented,
hospitals, a lot of big institutions—we could squeeze huge efficiencies “The United Kingdom is no longer a white country! The whole of Eu-
10 21st CENTURY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Offprint • May 2014in 1968, had released their genocid-
al tract, Limits to Growth, laying the
“scientific“ (though actually inept and
quite fraudulent) basis for policy mea-
sures which would reduce the world’s
population, based on the myth of lim-
ited resources and the denial of revolu-
tionary scientific progress, such as that
promised by fusion. While one form
this policy took was CIA-run coups
d'état to depose world leaders who
were too tenacious in their national de-
velopment policies,28 NSSM 200 was to
be implemented domestically as well,
as the earlier assassination of John F.
Kennedy had so vividly forewarned. A
major manifestation of this was the de-
ployment of the “slush fund” of Wall NFRI
St. moguls, the Nuclear Club of Wall South Korea's KSTAR tokamak in 2009. KSTAR is one of two superconducting
Street,29 to pour money into halting the tokamaks in the world, with a goal of training a generation of young fusion
shift from a fossil fuel-based economy scientists and engineers to contribute both to the international ITER project,
to a fission economy, and to castrate and to South Korea's own expanding fusion program. Pictured are Dr. Myeun
fusion before it could truly get off the Kwon, current president of the National Fusion Research Institute, and
ground. After all, the prognosis that fu- Marsha Freeman and Bill Jones of Executive Intelligence Review.
sion could set mankind free from pover-
ty with virtually unlimited energy, the end of famine, and projected by the Kennedy administration, which were
greatly extended average lifespans was simply unaccept- nearly double those of today.30
able to those who believed, as did the ancient Zeus, that It’s no wonder, then, that in August 1978, Schlesinger,
those who ruled had a duty to control, and sometimes on behalf of the policy of zero growth, had done every-
cull, the multitude. thing possible to contain news of the PLT breakthrough:
In order to have a large-scale effect on national econo- if fusion were indeed on the horizon, the myth that
mies, energy-intensive industry, which drives economic population growth is inherently unsustainable would be
growth, was put in the crosshairs. Following the orches- shattered—along with the primary justification for the
trated energy crisis of 1975 (and Carter’s plea to Ameri- ongoing implementation of policies to shut down global
cans to turn down their thermostats and put on a sweater), development.
cutbacks in energy usage were imposed on the industrial
sector as well, initiated by the reduction of energy us- What Must Be Done
age in Pittsburgh steel manufacturing with Schlesinger's With the successful postponement of fusion, the world
“Project Pacesetter” in April 1977. That policy was suc- now sits on the edge of a precipitous collapse in global
cessful. Since that time, average per capita energy con- population. The average age of the fusion scientist in
sumption for the total population has leveled off, and is the U.S. is rising. Elder scientists who made the break-
now beginning to fall, rather than growing to the levels throughs of the past decades are retiring. Teams which
are built one year at research institutions are often scat-
tered the next, and machines once mothballed are dis-
rope is changing. And even at the present rate, the white race is fin-
ished... I think in many ways we are overpopulated any way, but in the mantled and lost. We are rapidly losing the capabilities
best of all possible worlds, there will be rather fewer people every- which have been built up over the past six decades!
where.” See: “The Inside Story of the Club of Rome,” EIR, June 23, 1981. More fundamental, however, is the damage done to the
28. For example, Jaime Roldós of Ecuador (1981), Omar Torrijos of process of creative hypothesis itself. The pessimism of an
Panama (1981), and Indira Gandhi of India (1984). See: “Interview environment where one’s experiment has a good chance
with John Perkins: ‘There's a Tremendous Opportunity for Change’,”
EIR, December 10, 2004. of being shut down in the next 12-month budget cycle,
regardless of its successes or potential contributions to
29. For more on the Nuclear Club of Wall St., founded to counter the
influence of the Fusion Energy Foundation, see: “Hit Men vs. La-
Rouche's Fusion Energy Foundation.” http://www.larouchepub.com/ 30. “Civilian Nuclear Power: A Report to the President–1962,” U.S.
other/2004/3147_hit_men_vs_fef.html Atomic Energy Commission, Leland Haworth, Chairman.
Offprint • May 2014 21st CENTURY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 11the future, can stultify the creative process itself, which is While important international cooperation is currently
driven by passion and optimism for the future. occurring under the auspices of the ITER project, and
Mankind survives as a species because he progresses. work on the project will make significant contributions
The great leaps in the energy density of each successive to many aspects of fusion engineering design, ITER and
fuel source of man’s “Promethean fire” (wood, charcoal, its follow-on DEMO are not designed to yield a pow-
coal, coke, fossil fuels, etc.) have each corresponded to er-producing reactor for several decades.33 Therefore, a
a revolution in man’s power over nature, and a non-lin- crash program in the spirit of Project Sherwood and on
ear increase in, simultaneously, the potential population the scale of the Apollo Program must be launched imme-
density and the power applied per capita.31 Only fusion diately in the United States, closely coordinated with an
can ensure the continued survival of the human species acceleration of efforts around the globe, with the goal of
in the immediate decades ahead, and the capability of bringing fusion online within 10-15 years. This will take
making the discoveries which lead to the next great leap a full, long-term (not year to year) commitment from all
forward. nations involved. In the U.S., this will mean immediately
This must be a global effort. Though over the past 30 reassembling the best minds of the fusion program, many
years, the U.S. program has been under significant at- of whom are retired, semi-retired, or have been forced
tack, and is currently struggling to keep its doors open, to find work in other industries, to come together on the
nations of Asia have been making significant progress, effort. As proven by the tremendous progress made in
and have become leading partners in a global effort. the U.S. fusion program when it had full support, there
China and South Korea, for example, have both made is no technical or scientific reason that an accelerated
incredible strides in their fusion programs over the past program cannot achieve fusion in the immediate years
15 years, and have the only two advanced superconduct- ahead; it is a matter of political will.
ing tokamaks in the world, EAST in China, and KSTAR We must reverse this paradigm! The time has come for
in South Korea.32 Both nations have built impressive do- mankind to free itself from the dominance of the imperial
mestic fusion programs with very serious goals, budgets, system, and its genocidal policy of zero growth. We can
and timetables, geared toward post-ITER DEMO engi- no longer tolerate the fact that two-thirds of humanity lives
neering reactors. in conditions of poverty! Scientific discovery and its imple-
mentation express that which distinguishes man from beast,
31. See “Measuring Fire: Energy Flux Density,” in Physical Chemis- and allow an immortal contribution of the present genera-
try: The Continuing Gifts of Prometheus. http://www.larouchepac. tion to the future. The suppression of fusion must end!
com/prometheus.
32. For more on China's EAST tokamak, see: http://www.larouche- 33. Due to foot-dragging and budget cuts, largely on the part of the
pub.com/eiw/public/2011/eirv38n10-20110311/46-54_3810.pdf and U.S. government, the date of the first plasma of ITER has been de-
for South Korea's KSTAR tokamak, see: http://www.larouchepub. layed numerous times, and is currently not expected until 2023, or
com/eiw/public/2009/2009_40-49/2009_40-49/2009-47/pdf/28- possibly 2025. Operation of its successor, DEMO, is not scheduled to
35_3647.pdf begin until at least 2033.
In Their Own Words: Malthusians Demand Genocide
“Human population growth is probably the single most serious long-term threat to survival. We're in for a major disas-
ter if it isn't curbed...We have no option.” —Prince Philip, interview in People Magazine, December 21, 1981
“In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve
overpopulation.” —Prince Philip, Deutsche Press Agentur, August 1988
“It is almost self-evident that the greater the human population, the greater the demands for natural resources... The
paramount question deals with an optimum human population. How many is too many people in relation to available
resources? Many believe that our current environmental problems indicate that the optimum level has been surpassed.”
—Task Force on Earth, Resources and Population, George H. W. Bush, Chairman, July 8, 1970
“The decision for population control will be opposed by growth-minded economists and businessmen, by nationalistic states-
men, by zealous religious leaders, and by the myopic and well-fed of every description. It is therefore incumbent on all who
sense the limitations of technology and the fragility of the environmental balance to make themselves heard above the hol-
low, optimistic chorus—to convince society and its leaders that there is no alternative but the cessation of our irresponsible,
all-demanding, and all-consuming population growth.”
—John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama, and Paul R. Erlich, 1969
12 21st CENTURY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Offprint • May 2014You can also read
